by Anne Morice
‘Yes, you’ve more or less summed it up,’ Robin agreed. ‘It was useless for him to deny it, once his business affairs had been investigated. He’s pleading guilty, by the way.’
‘Poor old Nancy and Anabel! They’re the ones I feel sorry for.’
‘In a sense, it’s not half so bad for Anabel, though, is it?’
‘I suppose not. Tell me something; were Nancy and Guy ever married?’
‘Yes, briefly. They met in a summer show in Brighton. She was about eighteen and wildly impressed, I dare say, by all his name-dropping. Then she got pregnant, and he was out of work, and the marriage broke up. She went back to her parents, until Roger rode up on his white charger. He took the child on as well, but Nancy seems always to have resented her. Guy, in the meantime, had married Xenia and retired into the antiques business, although, as you have discovered, he wasn’t too choosy about where the stock came from. It was sheer fluke that he and Nancy eventually landed up in the same village; though, given their later careers, one could say that Burleigh was a typical sort of background for both of them. And neither Roger nor Xenia was the type to be dislodged by such a poor little skeleton in the cupboard as Anabel. Cole dug this up, but naturally, he only passed it on to me in the strictest confidence.’
‘And, for once, Tessa, I think you must admit he was right. If Robin had let you into those secrets, I can just see you going all out to pin the murder on Guy, the long-lost, avenging father. It would have fitted your novelettish view of life.’
‘I might remind you that it was my novelettish view of life which made me insist on Christabel’s innocence, and that can’t be bad.’
‘However, you never managed to find out how Roger persuaded her to swallow the poison,’ Robin said. ‘So far, he’s only been charged with one murder, which will do to be going on with.’
‘No need to go on with it for long, though. O’Malley and I have got it all straightened out. In the first place, he did it by remote control and the wheels had been set in motion long before she sent the message asking for me. I believe that he had only pretended to play along with her, when she issued her ultimatum and he never really trusted her to keep her mouth shut. I expect he’d have found a simpler method of killing her, but the fire, and her being in hospital, forced his hand.’
‘Forced his hand to what?’
‘I must explain that, on the day after the fire, I called at the hospital to leave some flowers. She wasn’t allowed visitors, but heaps of people had rung up and sent things. Among them was a whacking great hamper, with the Harper Barringtons’ card on it; and what do you suppose was included, along with the peaches and grapes? Some dear little boxes of chewing-gum. Wasn’t that brilliant? He guessed that she wouldn’t be allowed to smoke and would inevitably run out of cigarettes, in any case; and he also knew, as we all did, about her habit of swallowing gum practically whole, during these crises.’
‘Your theory being that the poison was in the gum? Everything of that kind was analysed, but the results were all negative.’
‘The whole plan would have hinged on its being in only one piece. The only way you could have found it was by analysing everything before she died, and nobody thought of that.’
‘I suppose it could have been injected into the gum,’ Robin admitted slowly. ‘Only such a minute quantity would have been needed.’
‘And there were masses of chemicals and instruments down in the cellar. Mr Evans says all you’d need is a syringe and a steady hand. Roger could have practised it for as long as he liked. Besides, Christabel was far too careless and shortsighted to notice if one piece of gum had got a bit mangled.’
Robin stood up: ‘I couldn’t guarantee it, but I think you may have got something. I’d better talk to Cole. The Maltings was searched, inside and out, including that famous Hobbies Room, but it might be worth taking another look.’
‘That’s how it is nowadays,’ I sighed, when he had gone. ‘Not a word of thanks, you notice. All he thinks about is bringing comfort and cheer to silly old Cole.’
‘Well, I expect he likes to feel he is taking some active part. You seem to have left him so little to do.’
‘Oh, nonsense, Toby! You make me sound too bossy for words. Besides, he’s done the job he came here to do, and that’s what counts. The murders were just an unforeseen complication. Although, to be frank, I do think Cole’s method of poring over statements and fingerprints is rather a waste of time. It doesn’t get you anywhere, when you’re up against a bunch like this.’
‘Perhaps they should disband the police force, after all? Hand the whole thing over to such members of the theatrical profession who happen to be resting?’
‘Well, at least my enforced rest enabled me to pay attention to Aunt Moo’s words of wisdom.’
‘Is that what they’re called?’
‘Admittedly, not always the right words in the right place, but she’s as shrewd as they come, and if you spend enough time on it you soon begin to tune in. Incidentally, I suppose you’re not worried about your inheritance being systematically whittled away, down at the Treasure Trove?’
‘Not at all. I’m in favour of her having an interesting hobby for her declining years. Also, to be quite truthful, Tessa, she’s making mincemeat of those Robinsons. I happen to know that she’s unloading all the junk on them and getting the most inflated prices. I should never be surprised if my capital were increasing by leaps and bounds.’
‘So there you are! It confirms what I was saying. She was always telling us that Xenia didn’t know a fig about antiques and paid far too much for everything. Uncle Mad said it, too, by the way, but he overstated the case by hinting that the shop was a cover-up for something criminal. He hinted it to all and sundry, though, so there was no point in murdering him to shut him up. The rumour had got around, whether true or not. Aunt Moo knew it wasn’t, of course, and she also knew something about Maddox which was worth waiting for. When I got the message, I never looked back.’
‘Good heavens! Whatever can it have been?’
‘She said he was a very curious man and, furthermore that he was curious about a lot of other things as well as pictures. As a matter of fact, the word was inquisitive, and when I understood that it gave me a different view of things. Until then we’d been bogged down in the belief that paintings and art thefts were at the root of this murder; but then I began asking myself what secret, discreditable knowledge he might have dug up, which had no connection with such things. Roger was an obvious starting point, because he was Top of the Get Rich Quick League, and people who adore money and spend their time amassing it are apt to be vulnerable.’
‘That’s really most interesting,’ Toby said thoughtfully. ‘And, honestly, Tessa, I have the strongest feeling that you should tell Robin about this. No doubt, he would have preferred to solve the case all by himself, but it may come as balm to the wounds to know that it is not you he has to thank, but Aunt Moo.’
‘You are absolutely right,’ I agreed. ‘I was coming to the same conclusion, myself. And you never know, Toby. Between us, we might just be able to convince him that he’d have caught on himself if he’d ever understood a single word she uttered.’
T H E E N D
Felicity Shaw
The detective novels of Anne Morice seem rather to reflect the actual life and background of the author, whose full married name was Felicity Anne Morice Worthington Shaw. Felicity was born in the county of Kent on February 18, 1916, one of four daughters of Harry Edward Worthington, a well-loved village doctor, and his pretty young wife, Muriel Rose Morice. Seemingly this is an unexceptional provenance for an English mystery writer—yet in fact Felicity’s complicated ancestry was like something out of a classic English mystery, with several cases of children born on the wrong side of the blanket to prominent sires and their humbly born paramours. Her mother Muriel Rose was the natural daughter of dressmaker Rebecca Garnett Gould and Charles John Morice, a Harrow graduate and footballer who played in the 1872 Engla
nd/Scotland match. Doffing his football kit after this triumph, Charles became a stockbroker like his father, his brothers and his nephew Percy John de Paravicini, son of Baron James Prior de Paravicini and Charles’ only surviving sister, Valentina Antoinette Sampayo Morice. (Of Scottish mercantile origin, the Morices had extensive Portuguese business connections.) Charles also found time, when not playing the fields of sport or commerce, to father a pair of out-of-wedlock children with a coachman’s daughter, Clementina Frances Turvey, whom he would later marry.
Her mother having passed away when she was only four years old, Muriel Rose was raised by her half-sister Kitty, who had wed a commercial traveler, at the village of Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, near the city of Margate. There she met kindly local doctor Harry Worthington when he treated her during a local measles outbreak. The case of measles led to marriage between the physician and his patient, with the couple wedding in 1904, when Harry was thirty-six and Muriel Rose but twenty-two. Together Harry and Muriel Rose had a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1906. However Muriel Rose’s three later daughters—Angela, Felicity and Yvonne—were fathered by another man, London playwright Frederick Leonard Lonsdale, the author of such popular stage works (many of them adapted as films) as On Approval and The Last of Mrs. Cheyney as well as being the most steady of Muriel Rose’s many lovers.
Unfortunately for Muriel Rose, Lonsdale’s interest in her evaporated as his stage success mounted. The playwright proposed pensioning off his discarded mistress with an annual stipend of one hundred pounds apiece for each of his natural daughters, provided that he and Muriel Rose never met again. The offer was accepted, although Muriel Rose, a woman of golden flights and fancies who romantically went by the name Lucy Glitters (she told her daughters that her father had christened her with this appellation on account of his having won a bet on a horse by that name on the day she was born), never got over the rejection. Meanwhile, “poor Dr. Worthington” as he was now known, had come down with Parkinson’s Disease and he was packed off with a nurse to a cottage while “Lucy Glitters,” now in straitened financial circumstances by her standards, moved with her daughters to a maisonette above a cake shop in Belgravia, London, in a bid to get the girls established. Felicity’s older sister Angela went into acting for a profession, and her mother’s theatrical ambition for her daughter is said to have been the inspiration for Noel Coward’s amusingly imploring 1935 hit song “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington.” Angela’s greatest contribution to the cause of thespianism by far came when she married actor and theatrical agent Robin Fox, with whom she produced England’s Fox acting dynasty, including her sons Edward and James and grandchildren Laurence, Jack, Emilia and Freddie.
Felicity meanwhile went to work in the office of the GPO Film Unit, a subdivision of the United Kingdom’s General Post Office established in 1933 to produce documentary films. Her daughter Mary Premila Boseman has written that it was at the GPO Film Unit that the “pretty and fashionably slim” Felicity met documentarian Alexander Shaw—“good looking, strong featured, dark haired and with strange brown eyes between yellow and green”—and told herself “that’s the man I’m going to marry,” which she did. During the Thirties and Forties Alex produced and/or directed over a score of prestige documentaries, including Tank Patrol, Our Country (introduced by actor Burgess Meredith) and Penicillin. After World War Two Alex worked with the United Nations agencies UNESCO and UNRWA and he and Felicity and their three children resided in developing nations all around the world. Felicity’s daughter Mary recalls that Felicity “set up house in most of these places adapting to each circumstance. Furniture and curtains and so on were made of local materials. . . . The only possession that followed us everywhere from England was the box of Christmas decorations, practically heirlooms, fragile and attractive and unbroken throughout. In Wad Medani in the Sudan they hung on a thorn bush and looked charming.”
It was during these years that Felicity began writing fiction, eventually publishing two fine mainstream novels, The Happy Exiles (1956) and Sun-Trap (1958). The former novel, a lightly satirical comedy of manners about British and American expatriates in an unnamed British colony during the dying days of the Empire, received particularly good reviews and was published in both the United Kingdom and the United States, but after a nasty bout with malaria and the death, back in England, of her mother Lucy Glitters, Felicity put writing aside for more than a decade, until under her pseudonym Anne Morice, drawn from her two middle names, she successfully launched her Tessa Crichton mystery series in 1970. “From the royalties of these books,” notes Mary Premila Boseman, “she was able to buy a house in Hambleden, near Henley-on-Thames; this was the first of our houses that wasn’t rented.” Felicity spent a great deal more time in the home country during the last two decades of her life, gardening and cooking for friends (though she herself when alone subsisted on a diet of black coffee and watercress) and industriously spinning her tales of genteel English murder in locales much like that in which she now resided. Sometimes she joined Alex in his overseas travels to different places, including Washington, D.C., which she wrote about with characteristic wryness in her 1977 detective novel Murder with Mimicry (“a nice lively book saturated with show business,” pronounced the New York Times Book Review). Felicity Shaw lived a full life of richly varied experiences, which are rewardingly reflected in her books, the last of which was published posthumously in 1990, a year after her death at the age of seventy-three on May 18th, 1989.
Curtis Evans
About The Author
Anne Morice, née Felicity Shaw, was born in Kent in 1916.
Her mother Muriel Rose was the natural daughter of Rebecca Gould and Charles Morice. Muriel Rose married a Kentish doctor, and they had a daughter, Elizabeth. Muriel Rose’s three later daughters—Angela, Felicity and Yvonne—were fathered by playwright Frederick Lonsdale.
Felicity’s older sister Angela became an actress, married actor and theatrical agent Robin Fox, and produced England’s Fox acting dynasty, including her sons Edward and James and grandchildren Laurence, Jack, Emilia and Freddie.
Felicity went to work in the office of the GPO Film Unit. There Felicity met and married documentarian Alexander Shaw. They had three children and lived in various countries.
Felicity wrote two well-received novels in the 1950’s, but did not publish again until successfully launching her Tessa Crichton mystery series in 1970, buying a house in Hambleden, near Henley-on-Thames, on the proceeds. Her last novel was published a year after her death at the age of seventy-three on May 18th, 1989.
By Anne Morice
and available from Dean Street Press
1. Death in the Grand Manor (1970)
2. Murder in Married Life (1971)
3. Death of a Gay Dog (1971)
4. Murder on French Leave (1972)
5. Death and the Dutiful Daughter (1973)
6. Death of a Heavenly Twin (1974)
7. Killing with Kindness (1974)
8. Nursery Tea and Poison (1975)
9. Death of a Wedding Guest (1976)
10. Murder in Mimicry (1977)
Published by Dean Street Press 2021
Copyright © 1971 Anne Morice
Introduction copyright © 2021 Curtis Evans
All Rights Reserved
First published in 1971 by Macmillan
Cover by DSP
ISBN 978 1 913527 96 9
www.deanstreetpress.co.uk